MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS

By Aleister Crowley

Chapter LXVII: Faith

Cara Soror,

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Dear me! dear me! this is very unexpected. I wrote you a long while
ago about doubt, and now I suppose the seed fell in fertile ground! My
chaste remarks have prompted a new question "arising out of the previous
answer, Sir."

You point out quite correctly that the doubt of which I wrote in passages
of such burning eloquence is after all what used to be called
"philosophic" doubt; and by "philosophic" people apparently
meant something rather like "Pickwickians."

Not the genuine McCoy, determining action, but—well, rather like
scoring points in an intellectual game.

Now then (air connu) what is Faith? There are two kinds; and they
are almost exact opposites. (N.B. The word is allied to Bide: there's
some idea of endurance (or perhaps repose) in it. Cf Peter!?!?!?)
Then the third kind, which is moral, not intellectual; as in "good
faith," bona fide, yours faithfully; and this is probably the
hallmarked sense, for it implies just that endurance which goes with bide,
and is not dependent in any way upon reason or conviction. This then
I may dismiss as impertinent to the question in your letter, and stick
to the other two.

Faith in its Meaning Number One was perfectly well defined by the
schoolboy: "the faculty of believing that which we know to be untrue."
It is at least the acceptance of any statement as true without criticism,
examination, verification, or any other method of test. Faith of this
sort is evidently the main symptom of the moron, the half-wit, the
village idiot. It is this kind of faith upon the possession and exercise
of which religious persons always insist as the first condition
of salvation.

Here is my own lamentable foresight on the subject!

The Convert

There met one eve in a sylan glade
A horrible Man and a beautiful maid.
"Where are you going, so meek and holy?"
"I'm going to temple to worship Crowley."
"Crowley is God, then? How did you know?"
"Why, it's Captain Fuller that told us so."
"And how do you know that Fuller was right?"
"I'm afraid you're a wicked man; Good-night."

While this sort of thing is styled success
I shall not count failure bitterness.

Sometimes, note well! they are even frank about it, and say plainly
that there would be no merit in it if there were any reasonable basis
for it! This position is at the worst both honest and intelligible;
the only trouble is that there is no possible means of deciding which
to two conflicting statements to accept.

In faith of this kind there are of course in practice delicately shaded
degrees; these depend mostly upon the authority of the speaker and
your relations with, and opinion of, him. In practice, moreover, faith
is usually tinged—should I say clouded?—by questions of probability.
I see no need to weary you with examples of varying degrees; it is
enough to dismiss the subject with the remark that faith is not true
faith if any considerations of any kind sully its virgin nullity.

To prop faith is to destroy it: I am reminded of Mr. Harry Price's
young lady of Brocken fame, who was so timorously careful of her
virginity that she never felt it safe unless she had a man in bed with
her.

What is the other kind of faith? Like its hostile twin, it must have
no truck with reason, at least no conscious truck, or it ceases to
possess a moral meaning. It is that confidence* in oneself which
assures one that the long shot at the tiger will fly true to the mark,
that the tricky putt will go down, that the man one never beat before
will go down this time; also its horrid contrary, the moral certainty
that something will go wrong, even with the easiest problems, with one
hundred to one in one's favour.

I think the official answer is that one's certainty is in reality based
upon subconscious calculation, so that faith has nothing whatever to do
with it. If there is any answer to this, I don't know it.

After all, that is neither here nor there; there is but one material
issue: how to acquire that kind of faith. Suppose we hunt it up in
that precious Book of Lies! Any luck? Sure, kiddums,
here we are!

Steeped Horsehair

Mind is a disease of semen.

All that a man is or may be is hidden therein

Bodily functions are parts of the machine; silent, unless in dis-ease.

But mind, never at ease, creaketh "I."

This I persisteth not, posteth not through generations, changeth momently, finally is dead.

Therefore is man only himself when lost to himself in The Charioting.

Nothing in that to contradict the official view, is there? Nothing in biology either.

Or in Blake:

"If the Sun and Moon should doubt
They'd immediately go out."

Or in that other chapter of the Book of Lies:

The Mountaineer

Consciousness is a symptom of disease.

All that moves well moves without will.

All skilfullness, all strain, all intention is contrary to ease.

Practise a thousand times, and it becomes difficult; a thousand, thousand, and it becomes easy; a
thousand, thousand times a thousand thousand, and it is no longer Thou that doeth it, but It that
doeth itself through thee. Not until then is that which is done well done.

Thus spoke FRATER PERDURABO as he leapt from rock to rock of the moraine without ever casting his eyes
upon the ground.

Conclusion: this discussion has for ever abolished the use of the
word faith to imply conscious belief of any sort.

At least, if there should ever be an element of awareness, it is of
the nature of a sudden leap into daylight of the quintessence of a
mass of subconsciously selected and ordered experience.

Then what, if you please, did Paul mean when he wrote "Faith is the substance of
things hoped-for, the evidence of things unseen." Oh, spot the Lady!

Love is the law, love under will.

Yours etc.

P.S. Don't take any wooden money.

P.P.S. I have a marvelous proposition for you; I wouldn't let in
anyone on it but my very best friend: there's a man in San Luis Potosi
in a mine there; he stole about $20,000 worth of gold dust and now
he's afraid to get rid of it, but he knows I'm safe and knows how to
handle it and I've been his very best friend for twenty years, and he's
as straight as a die, and I know he'd let us have it for $10,000 and
I've only got $4,000—and that is where you come in!

* "Confidence" = cum, with; fidere, to
trust = to trust fully. This confidence of which I write is usually a sort of "hunch".

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